GROWING UP ETHNIC IN TRANSNATIONAL WORLDS: IDENTITIES AMONG SECOND-GENERATION CHINESE AND DOMINICANS

Abstract

Transnationalism refers to the phenomenon of immigrants maintaining connections to their country of origin and using a dual frame of reference to evaluate their experiences and outcomes in the country in which they have settled. How does transnationalism matter in the identities among the second generation? This article argues that growing up with parents who want children to participate in their homeland imaginary and in a strong transnational social field does not necessarily mean second-generation Dominicans and Chinese will themselves adopt transnational orientations and/or practices. I find that my Chinese respondents, because of authoritarian parent-child relationships, relative loss of the ethnic language, and scarcity of contact with their parents’ countries of origin, viewed themselves as mainly ethnic subjects. Identities for my Chinese respondents involved a generational- and class-specific ethnic identity grounded in the enclaves and perceived rarefaction vis-à-vis mainstream America. My Dominican respondents, because of greater communication within the family, ethnic language maintenance, and the very frequent number of trips they made to the Dominican Republic, drew from both transnational and ethnic orientations, meaning they situated who they were within both national contexts. Although my Dominican respondents acknowledged the differences between Dominicans “back there” and themselves, they spoke cogently on class, gender, and the color line there as well as here. At the same time, their identities were informed by their pan-ethnicity in the United States, namely, how Latinos and Dominicans, in particular, are perceived.

Key Words:

• transnationalism
• ethnicity
• social class
• second generation
• identity

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the insightful comments of Caroline Brettell, who offered encouragement, skillfully organized this volume, and kindly provided insightful editorial guidance to the author in how to meet the suggested word limit; editor Jonathan Hill; and two anonymous reviewers. The author is also grateful for the funding extended by the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council to both studies; the generous dissertation funding of the Chinese project from the National Science Foundation, Yale University, and the China Times Cultural Foundation. The author appreciates the generous support of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a faculty grant of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, which gave the author the time and funds to conduct the Dominican and Colombian project.

Notes

1. I define the second generation as United States-born children of immigrants, and foreign-born children, who migrated to the United States by the age of twelve, and thus were largely educated and socialized here.

2. Depending on the unit of analysis (individuals, groups, organizations, local states), the particular characteristics of transnationalism can vary. The typology developed by Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt (1999) calls attention to levels of institutionalization (high and low) in the economic, political and sociocultural sectors. An example of low-level institutionalization in the economic sector would be immigrants who return to the homeland and form small businesses; in contrast, a type of high-level institutionalization would be “multinational investments in Third World countries” (222). Itzigsohn et al. (1999), meanwhile, advance the concept of “broad transnationality,” in which individuals may have relatively few engagements with the country of origin in terms of trips and institutionalization, but nonetheless employ “both countries as reference points” (323).

3. The CILS study is based in Miami, Florida, and San Diego, California, has followed respondents for more than ten years, and includes individuals from the following groups: Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and several other Latin American and Asian countries.

4. The Project on the Second Generation in Metropolitan New York focuses on adults, aged eighteen to thirty-two, who are either native-born (whites, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans) or second generation (Dominicans, West Indians, Chinese, Russian Jews, Colombians, Ecuadorians, and Peruvians), who were born in the United States to parents who immigrated after 1965, or who were born abroad but who arrived in the United States by the age of twelve and grew up here.

5. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened immigration to people from all countries after discontinuing policies that had favored Northern and Western Europeans, and restricted the immigration of Asians from the late nineteenth century onward, and of those from South, Central, and Eastern Europe starting in the early twentieth century (Foner 1987; Hing 1993).

6. Another transnational phenomenon resulting from the wealth of Asian nations during this time period are the so-called “parachute kids,” described by Ong (1999) and Zhou (1998: 683) as “a highly select group of foreign students age eight to seventeen who have arrived in the United States, mostly from Asia, to seek a better education in American elementary or high schools.” The children live in the United States on their own, typically under the supervision of a caretaker, while their parents shuttle back and from Asia to the United States, often managing transnational business ventures.

7. According to Waldinger (1986), this can be seen in how the two groups fared in the garment production industry. Following Puerto Ricans into neighborhoods and industries alike (and similarly discriminated against), Dominican migrant entrepreneurs tended to cluster into garment production. In the face of a decline in the American garment industry due to market forces during the late 1970s and early 1980s, Chinese entrepreneurs had the financial means to innovate accordingly, which their Dominican counterparts lacked the resources to do.

8. The two groups have also been incorporated in different ways, as reflected in United States Census data. In the years 1996–1999, the median income among Dominicans was $18,210, and 23.2 percent were on public assistance while 26.4 percent aged fifteen years and older had some college or more (Levitt 2001). Compare this with $63,000, the median family income among the Chinese in 2000, when 13 percent were living in poverty and 67 percent aged twenty-five to thirty-four years had some college or more (Xie and Goyette 2004). However, the Chinese American population in New York City, which was home to all my Chinese respondents, were not doing as well: 39 percent of adults twenty-five years and older had some form of postsecondary education, the median family income was $37,857, and 21 percent were living in poverty.

9. Research on the Dominicans was conducted in 2002–2004, and research on the Chinese in 1998–1999.

10. Otherwise, 69 percent of the Dominicans were born in the United States, and another 13 percent had arrived in the United States by the age of five. Amongst the Chinese, 55 percent were born in the United States, and nearly 28 percent had arrived by the age of 5.

11. Even if my Dominican respondents did not live in such a strongly transnational community, their parents were typically actors in a transnational field. By this, I mean the immigrant Dominican parents were engaged, in varying degrees, in the following activities: sending remittances back home, having secondary homes and/or binational businesses, frequently traveling back and forth, engaged in political activities, and maintaining Dominican cultural practices (language, media use).

12. Traditionally, the Chinese ideal family type is multigenerational, extending back to the ancestors and structured along a series of hierarchies: the collective over the individual, the elderly over the young, and men over women (Baker 1979).

13. I found this to be a class-specific phenomenon. For discussion of how suburban, middle-class Chinese American children understand relationships with their parents, please see Louie (2004).